Writing for Semiconductor Engineering, Michael Watts reports that Resistive RAM (ReRAM) appears to be gaining traction. “Once considered a universal memory candidate—a replacement for DRAM, flash and SRAM—ReRAM is carving out a niche between DRAM and storage-class memory,” Watts explained. “ReRAM (known alternately as RRAM), is a type of non-volatile memory that began garnering attention in 2009 when startup Unity Semiconductor emerged from stealth mode.”
Memory + Interfaces
Researchers eye graphene for next-gen memory chips
Stanford engineers have demonstrated a number of post-silicon memory materials and technologies based on graphene. According to Ramin Skibba of Stanford News, the materials are capable of storing significantly more data per square inch – all while sipping a fraction of the energy consumed by current memory chips.
This memory chip orbited the earth on March 23, 1965
Engadget’s Nathan Ingraham recently reported that a piece of RANAM (Random Access Non-Destructive Readout) from NASA’s Gemini 3 spacecraft is up for auction. The RANAM – containing 4096 bits of information – was a part of the first Gemini spacecraft on-board computer ever to fly on a manned mission.
Crossing the ReRAM bridge
Writing for IEEE Spectrum, Alexander Hellemans notes that researchers have thus far produced two commercially promising types of memristors: electrochemical metallization memory (EMC) cells and valence change mechanism memory (VCM) cells.
“In EMC cells, which have a copper electrode (called the active electrode), the copper atoms are oxidized—stripped of an electron—by the ‘write’ voltage,” he explained. “The resulting copper ions migrate through a solid electrolyte towards a platinum electrode. When they reach the platinum they get an electron back. Other copper ions arrive and pile on, eventually forming a pure metallic filament linking both electrodes, thus lowering of the resistance of the device.”
Amazon’s X1 packs up to 2TB of memory
Jeff Barr, the Chief Evangelist at Amazon Web Services, has confirmed that the company’s X1 instances will pack up to 2TB of memory. “On the high end, many of our enterprise customers are clamoring for instances that have very large amounts of memory,” Barr explained in a recent blog post. “They want to run SAP HANA and other in-memory databases, generate analytics in real time, process giant graphs using Neo4j or Titan, or create enormous caches.”
When memory and storage converge
Earlier this week, Rambus Chief Scientist Craig Hampel gave a keynote presentation at MemCon 2015 that explored the increasingly blurred lines between memory and storage. As Hampel notes, devices used as memory are typically volatile, byte addressable, directly writable, have deterministic latency and have an endurance greater than 1015 operations. In contrast, storage devices are non-volatile, block addressable, require an erase operation, have varied latency and have endurance limits that are much less than memory devices.